Networked Journalism Education

In this month’s Carnival of Journalism Michael Rosenblum urges journalists to go into business for themselves:

“We should arrange ourselves the way lawyers do, as limited partnerships.  Then some of the partners can carry on with their ‘investigative journalism’ while the others engage in more lucrative PR or Image Control and others launch web-related IPOs.

And instead of ‘working for’ the NY Times or NBC, we should simply license our work to them.  For a fee.”

Sound advice for two reasons:

(1) Journalists need a more intimate connection with the people who will read, watch and listen to their work. Nothing focuses attention like a paycheck. Nothing will improve writing, focus and creativity as much as figuring out what people will pay for directly with their money or time.

(2) News corporations have to re-invent themselves as people and information companies, not industrial factories. If they want to attract and retain the best, they have to act like 21st century companies and produce genuine value by investing in their most valuable resources — their employees. Competing with small, nimble and smart companies of journalists might be the kind of competition that will goose the entire industry.

News corporations are finely tuned to deliver mass content that they’ve sold to advertisers.

Networked media feature highly specific content and are decentralized, flexible, and interactive. A journalist can do a tremendous amount to add value to a community that is working through its public problems. A group of journalists who have joined together in a common purpose can keep costs low, differentiate their work and add value in much more strategic ways than a news corporation.

To the degree that responsible capitalism can improve journalism, amen. Teaching students the value of labor, capital and their place in the market will improve their chances of success in far more ways than another class in AP style. This isn’t a panacea for all places, people or types of journalism. But it’s an excellent suggestion for creating a new layer of sustainable journalism. Let the journalism shops/partnerships/small businesses and experiments flourish!

Robin Hutton on Flickr, licensed under Creative Commons

The best gift I can imagine from a software developer is a WordPress-like publishing and collaborating platform designed for doing journalism.

According to WordPress’s State of the Word, nearly 15% of the top million websites in the world are using WordPress. Twenty-two out of every 100 new active domains in the US use WordPress.

Hundreds of news sites are using WordPress. The Bangor Daily News uses WordPress for production and publication. The newspaper in Barga, Italy runs on WordPress. So does CNN’s PoliticalTicker as well as countless student newspapers.

WordPress is wonderful; it enables easy access to publishing for millions of people. I’m writing on a WordPress blog right now and I have nearly a dozen class sites in various stages of use.

But it is software for blogging. Journalists need a platform that enables a wider range of content to be published by a wider range of users using a much wider range of design tools. Journalists desperately need a content management system that is as easy and flexible as WordPress but built to enable collaborative, beautifully designed, multimedia rich, social media integrated news.

Image a tool box of widgets and plug-ins just for different types of journalism: wiki pages for context building, storify for all types of media with lots of design options, non-templated templates that allow for multiple size photos with captions, for large headlines, small headlines, contributed stories, rating tools, live chats, live coverage, crowdsourced maps, data visualizations, interactive databases and crowdsourced databases. Imagine a WordPress-like CMS that includes a work flow suitable for use by small and large newsrooms, by classrooms, nonprofits and neighborhood associations. It could be drag and drop, pop and play, easy to use out-of-the-box and open for all types of customization. It would look good on any browser and any device (I know, asking for the moon, but since you asked…)

A content management system built to accommodate all the amazing tools that developers are creating for journalists and that enables strong and beautiful design and is easy to use — that would be a gift of the decade.

I also have a related gift request, one that might not be so pie-in-the-sky. I would love a go-to-wiki that incudes a directory of all the cool tools developers are making that relate to journalism, with links to examples, how-to guides and user comments. So many experiments are flourishing around the world it’s impossible to keep track of all the wonderful gifts developers are already creating for journalists. People are using and customizing new tools in all kinds of unexpected ways. It would be incredibly useful to have a user-generated wiki directory that provided a one-stop place to learn about new tools that relate to creating, doing, producing, distributing and sustaining journalism. If anyone is interested in collaborating on such a project (or knows if such a thing already exists!) please comment below.

Those are my two wishes for this month’s Carnival of Journalism. For the record, I also wish for world peace, an end to hunger and a happy new year to all!

This is my response to this month’s Carnival of Journalism question: “ “What is the role of online video in the newsroom of the future?“

My speculation is that video will grow to be a dominant form of communication in the near future. Newsrooms will learn to use video along with the rest of us — through testing, experimentation and messing around. The role of video will naturally grow until it’s so natural we don’t even think about it.

I think this for two reasons:

First, I am pretty convinced that we are entering a new era of communication. My belief has been shaped in part by Mitchell Stephens in his 1998 book, The rise of the image the fall of the word, who argues that we are transitioning “from a culture dominated by the printed word to one dominated by moving images.”  In the preface he writes:

In the sixteenth century Rabelais exclaimed, “Printing…is now in use, so elegant and so correct, that better cannot be imagined….” Almost half a millennium has passed. My contention, simply stated, is that we are finally ready to imagine better, that once again we have come upon a form of communication powerful enough to help us fashion new understandings, stronger understandings.

This argument on behalf of video may discomfit my fellow print lovers. I have tried, however, to write with an appreciation for the grand accomplishments of the written and printed word and, therefore, for what it means to state that the moving image will surpass those accomplishments.

(Interestingly, like a snippet of lost video found on an old hard drive, an annotated conversation about Mitchell’s argument published in FEED mag is still available online.)

What this means to me is that we are in the throes of a much larger shift in communication than newsrooms can contain or manage. The transition is happening. Newsrooms will adapt or they will shrink, morph or disappear.

The second reason I believe this is that video is inherently more social than printed words, and social is where we are. My students read less and less; they love to watch video. They love to watch it in class where we can follow along at the same pace, laugh at the same places and transport ourselves — together — in ways that would be impossible in print. (Print can also transport us in ways that video can’t, but reading is essentially a solitary experience. My students crave connection and rarely allow themselves to experience solitariness.) Given that they are the future and they choose video, I think that’s our future, too.